Track's Best Rabbit Retires

Matt Scherer was the go-to pacer for middle-distance races.

In his pre-rabbit days, Matt Scherer competed in the 800 meters at the 2008 Olympic Trials. Victor Sailer/PhotoRun

Matt Scherer has been the most sought-after rabbit for men's middle-distance track races the past several years. His magnum opus as a pacer may have been guiding David Rudisha to an American all-comers 800-meter record of 1:41.74 in New York in 2012.

On Saturday night in Heusden, Belgium, Scherer was the rabbit in another 800, helping 2012 Olympic bronze medalist Timothy Kitum to a 1:43.65 victory. As blogger Paul Merca writes, it was Scherer’s 74th assignment as a rabbit, and his last.

“Happily, and with no regrets, tonight was my last time on a track,” Scherer tweeted. As one of his followers noted, it was the end of a career in which Scherer “made lots of other people's dreams come true.”

Scherer, 30, was a Pac-10 champion at 400 meters for the University of Oregon who later emphasized the 800, finishing third in the 2009 USATF Indoor Championships and running a best time of 1:46.11. He was part of an Oregon Track Club foursome that set an American indoor distance medley relay record of 9:27.11 in 2010.

By 2011, Scherer was almost exclusively employed as a rabbit, after having paced Sudan’s Abubaker Kaki to a national 1000-meter record of 2:13.62 in 2010. He became a favorite pacer of Mo Aman, the 2013 world champion in the 800. Scherer paced Aman to Ethiopian national indoor records twice, both times in Stockholm, culminating with a 1:45.05 in 2013.

Scherer is 6’2”, which made him good to draft off of. Going through the first 400 of an 800, he prided himself on being able to come within two-tenths of a second of the designated desired pace, which could sometimes be 49 seconds and a fraction. His website provides a detailed chart of what was requested and what he delivered as a rabbit.

Rabbiting was a science for Scherer. He may have had a finely calibrated internal clock, but he worked at tuning it. He explained in 2013, “I'm practice actually trying to hit certain paces. So when I'm doing 200 repeats I might try to hit a 25.5 or a 26.5, and then I'll just keep doing that over and over and over again.” He added, “I am thinking the whole time and trying to figure out if the wind is affecting me, or feel the pace, whether I need to pick it up or slow it down.”

Rabbiting in track is nothing new. It gained great attention in 1954, when Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher helped pace Roger Bannister to the first sub-4:00 mile.

Chataway and Brasher were world-class runners themselves; Brasher won the 1956 Olympic steeplechase. The leading rabbits in men’s middle distance races in the 21st century have included elites like David Krummenacker, a world indoor 800-meter champion, and those who wouldn’t be on the track in world-class races if they hadn’t found their pacing niche, like Scherer and Martin Keino. Lewis Johnson, who does commentary and trackside interviews for NBC and other TV outlets, was a 1:47 800-meter runner who spent several season on the European circuit as a rabbit.

Rabbiting is a team effort, of course, and the pacer and the people being paced need to be on the same page. In any televised Diamond League track meet, there may be five or six rabbited races, and in least one of them you’ll see a rabbit so far ahead that the field is not benefiting from his or her services. The rabbit may be going too quickly, or the runners in the field may be ignoring the designated pace and focusing on racing each other.

Sometimes the field will belatedly get going. Sometimes the rabbit will slow and almost backtrack. And sometimes, he’ll get away and never come back. Tom Byers was pacing a 1981 mile field including world record holder Steve Ovett when the field lost contact; depending on which account you read, Byers was between seven and ten seconds ahead with a lap remaining. He stayed in the race and although Ovett scrambled to within a second, Byers was rewarded with one of the biggest wins of his career.